Understanding ICE:

•Make sure the image size is right for our purpose. If you intend to kill a tree and print it out, 2000px X 1600px should be the max. For web or email sharing, consider your screen resolution as the max. Currently, the most frequently used screen resolution is 1366px X 768px.

•Find the right balance or Custom Objects to use. Although Custom Objects add a lot of great context and realism, they can slow down the rendering time considerably if too many objects are used. Know when to say when.

Using ICE better:

•Once you setup your view, make a copy of the file and delete everything that is NOT in the scene, especially lights.

•Use a few lights as possible. When laying out lights, start in complete darkness and add one light at a time until you feel your layout is well lit. Toggling back-and-forth between Classic and Reveal is a great tool for this.

•Use the Photo Preview early and often when creating your scene. This will help avoid rendering out a full-sized image only to see at the end you made a mistake.

These tips may affect quality to use our direction:

•Shadow Type: Use Area Shadows only where you need highly detailed shadows. Lighting general areas and/or lights farther away from the focus of the image should use Shadow Maps.

•For Shadow Quality, start with Medium. Bump up to High only if you feel they need more detail.

•The higher the Shadow Softness the more rendering time needed. Shadow Softness = 0 is very hard-edged look. Shadow Softness = 10 is very diffused.

Ultimate Tip:

•Add more RAM to your PC. It's the biggest bang-for-your-buck change you could make to speed up rendering time. And it's cheap too. ICEcubes use 8 GB of RAM or more.